When 'the space' begins to resemble a cage

Myspace is now just 'The Space,' and its increasingly becoming a corral. Or it was always a corral and people are just realizing it.

The preconditions for this were built in to myspace.com from the very beginning. A young, tech-savvy populace that had been brought up to define themselves in terms of demographics and brand-allegiance. A networking website snatched up by a corporate culture with well-honed skills in masquerading as under-the-radar cultural subversion. Then, one or two high-profile myspace scandals. And suddenly you have:

• 'To Catch a Predator,' the ubiquitous Dateline segment that seems to have become a weekly show of its own, where a creepy, self-righteous television anchor catches creepier online predators in the act of seeking out sex from underage kids. There seems to be no end to the number of creeps out there, but little is made of the everyday banality and sheer number of predators out there. How does our concept of 'predator' change when shows like this convey the sense that their number is never-ending and they appear to be all around us?
  
• Mainstream newstories like this one about a 16 year old Michigan girl who tricked her parents into getting her a passport which she immediately used to fly to Jordan to meet some dude she met via myspace.
  
• Billy Brag appologizing on his myspace page for taking down his music because of myspace's clause in their user agreement that everything you post on the site, from personal details to personal photos to videos to songs from your band, instantly "belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world." You then have people commenting on Bragg's myspace blog, using myspace to talk about what fascists myspace's owners are.
  
• Telephone records are no longer giving the NSA what they want, so they are turning to social networking sites like myspace instead, as the data-mining possibilities are endless when you cross-reference links between people with the data they post about themselves.
  

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